


Minutes

by eurodox59



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: (some very good mind nonsense happens too), Gen, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Mind-magic bullshit, Non-consensual Mind-Control, Self-Loathing Issues, Telepathy, prewar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 19:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12514920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurodox59/pseuds/eurodox59
Summary: Lee Finch glances at her partner then checks her watch. Fifty-four seconds. With each breath the heat, the tension, the pressure to perform mounts. She shores herself up under all that weight. Has no other choice because she can’t afford to panic because the price of failure is everyone’s death. Well, maybe not hers.Lee has certain abilities that the government has already taken a keen interest in. If she gets caught… well, that’d depend on who catches her. But all roads lead to the grave. Or to looking at it with a certain longing.Note: I no longer consider this part of Lee's canon. I'm leaving it up because I still like it.





	Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> With endless thanks to [hotot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotot) and [ghostofshe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostofshe) for their many wonderful headcanons! May the pre-war world be ever bleak, dreary, and entropic.

One minute. In one minute, the MP will pass. One more city block on the path to their freedom.

The freedom of seventeen Canadian refugees.

Lee Finch glances at her partner then checks her watch. Fifty four seconds. With each breath the heat, the tension, the pressure to perform mounts. She shores herself up under all that weight. Has no other choice because she can’t afford to panic, because the price of failure is everyone’s death. Well, maybe not hers.

Lee has certain _abilities_ that the government has already taken a keen interest in. If she gets caught… well that’d depend on who catches her. But all roads lead to the grave. Or to looking at it with a certain longing.

After a lifetime of practice, she doesn’t have to reach for those abilities. She uses them directly to project a measure of calm into the mind of each refugee. That way they don’t make sudden noises from anywhere but their feet. Then, she checks her watch again. Thirty one seconds. 

She scans the area with her mind, looking for whatever patrols are out and about tonight. She finds the next patrolman about to make his pass long before she can hear the gasoline-powered engine purring.

She checks her watch again. Twenty five seconds. With no surprises in either one of her sights, she waves the group over to her as the cop car passes them by, keeping a firm grip on her breathing. Tension coils in her limbs, ready and waiting to strike. What she’s doing here, tonight, is an act of treason, ain’t no two ways about it. Except one: normally treason’s a big no-no in her books, the ones with all the little rules she hangs on to, to tell her what’s what so that the government can’t tell her otherwise. But they’re killing noncombatants here in Toronto, where her fellow Americans are stealing the oil. They’re stealing the lumber, too. Hell, they’re stealing everything including and beyond the lives of the people here. They’re killing noncombatants and they expect her to just shut up and join them.

Fuck. That.

She checks her watch again. Ten seconds. She’s done a hell of a lot of killing already, both with and without her abilities. But she draws the line here, and places herself on the side of these burnt-out humanitarians and their desperate charges. The cop’s engine grows softer and softer as the car rolls further away, moving just out of her hearing range in time for the final countdown.

Three… Two… One… She opens the door in one smooth motion, stepping out onto the street and signaling her partner to move . The resistance man wears the US army’s olive-drab fatigues, wears a combat helmet and hides a ballistic vest in his uniform. He is decorated in all the insignia of an American MP, but that won’t hold up to any serious scrutiny. Good thing they’re just crossing the street.

This late at night, the curfew is in full effect. Army Cops patrol the streets at regular intervals shooting or arresting anyone who won’t comply, often according to the whim of a particular cop. The army holds regular executions in the streets and then punishes nearby noncombatants for being traumatized. And it works. Everybody knows to avoid the so-called “rebels”. Everybody except the people who want out.

From the rear of the group, Lee scans the street one more time, using both her mind and her eyes. No surprises at eye level. She is the last person through the target door. Turning to her confederate, she asks for a headcount. He counts them silently. Seventeen. Everybody made it. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

The building they’re in is meant to be a pickup point. She senses one of the civilians getting up. He intends to find a light switch. The plan is for them to wait where they are before continuing onwards. By the prearranged timetable a truck should arrive for them in no more than seven minutes, after allowing for delays. Tonight is… unusually tight, she has far less wiggle room than she’s used to, but she’s also running a group through the very heart of American power in the city, so ideally there should be _no_ delays.

Lee walks over to the nearest switch, intercepting the man before he can give them away. He look to her with a bemused expression. She mouths the word “curfew” and he nods in understanding. She’s been working on their minds all night, trying to get them to be on their best behavior. Judging by his reaction, it’s working.

All is well for the first minute. Lee and the “insurgent” settle in for the wait. Laughter has another little giggle while trying to apply the term to Lee’s confederate. Lee swallows a giggle of her own. Almost like children, the refugees follow their lead.

The next few minutes pass by quietly. There is little else to do until the truck arrives. A decade ago Lee used to wonder at night whether anything she did would make a difference in the world. Now, after seeing the government in action both in Alaska and here in Toronto, she knows the answer is a firm _no_. 

Six minutes in, another gas-powered engine can be heard in the distance. Whether their wheelman has come through for them is another question entirely. Lee reaches out once more, scanning their brain for the answer.

The driver is American. One of the bad guys. She swallows a curse. There were a million things that could’ve gone wrong, but now is a shit time to dwell on them. Scrambling for control over herself she, scans the truck to find only two minds in it. She then pulls back into herself with a snap.

Fear screams and shouts in her ear, wrestles for control of her mind. She stuffs it in a little box where it continues writhe and thrash. The lock holds steady, though, so she takes a deep breath to center herself and dives deep into her own head. 

Lee opens her eyes and looks out of a window next to the door. One of the doors to the truck is partially ajar, as though someone was in the process of exiting the vehicle. She then looks at her wrist, angling her watch to catch the light from a streetlamp. The second hand moves slowly, sluggishly, taking its time to go from its previous resting point to the next. It would be imperceptible in its motion if some of the inner mechanisms of her watch were not exposed. Here she’s looking at a facsimile of the real world. She confirms this by watching the little gears turn. This is further demonstrated when she notices a metal bucket at her feet. One that may well be the very bucket that she stuffed all the questions into. She reaches in, and pulls one out.

 _For what purpose are they here?_ Okay, so the bucket _doesn’t_ contain the questions about what went wrong. But this one is even better: it has the questions she _needs_ to focus on.

To answer the question, she grasps the mind of the man exiting the truck with her own. Rifling through his thoughts reveals what’s probably one of her least favorite doomsday scenarios: her group is being actively hunted.

Lee refrains from unleashing a string of curses. She grasps his mind again. Well, _they_ aren’t being hunted, but the local commander knows that a group of refugees is making a run for it and he intends to catch them. One more thing of note, Lee comes across a thought in his mind: _if only these Canadians understood what we’re doing for them._ At once she feels Laughter and Rage competing to express themselves in her. The man’s firmly held belief that the people of this nation would bare their collective ass is somewhere beyond disgusting. It’s _vile_. Villainous, even. Or it would be if he didn’t honestly believe such filth.

She shoves them both to the side and pulls another question from the new bucket. It morphs as she reads it, words rearranging themselves or even flying away before her eyes to form a new question.

 _What are our options?_ Immediately, Lee can think of three ways out. There are the two classics: distracting their pursuers and killing them. She immediately decides against any killing due to the amount of heat it would bring down on the Canadians. While it’s only a matter of time before the occupiers decide to bring their full weight down on Toronto, more heat could easily cut that time short. 

Most important: a distraction simply would not afford many positive outcomes. Ignoring the particular methods, the best case scenario would have the grunts distracted for only a moment while they made their escape. And afterwards? Probably a repeat of the Second . Lee shudders, remembering the sheer volume of human blood. After six years of fighting, she’s ready to believe the worst of her comrades in arms. And for those memories of bloody rivers, Lee decides against a distraction.

Or! Or option three: Lee could use her powers. And as much as she wants to set the idea aside and save it for a more desperate need, she doesn’t exactly have other ways out.

So now she’s left with her mind shit. Lee cooked up plenty of tricks back in Alaska, turned one of them on its head to keep her group calm, but what kinds of tricks will help her here?

Glancing back out the window, the… uh, _collaborator_ , she names him, stands foot of the stairs leading to the door. His right hand twitches near his sidearm, almost imperceptible. With the realization comes a cloudy sensation covering her mind telling her that she needs to hurry up and decide, because she can’t hold this state forever.

Now, mind shit. Much as she wants to help the refugees, she has not told anyone about her abilities, nor does she intend to. So any solution has to also keep her secret hidden from everyone, including the Canadians. With that in mind, she can go back and enhance the other two options or… take them, using direct mind manipulation.

Compassion, the gentle and faithful dog, rears its head in her direction, looking at her with sad eyes. He… _no, It_ , is joined by a frail and battered rabbit whose name she knows well: Love. Together they are… an extremely potent force, so she considers the other two options first.

Using her powers to control their nervous systems, Lee could make their deaths look like some accident of poor health and timing. The key problem remains the same, however: disposing of the corpses. While heart failure won’t give the Army an excuse to crack down on the city, killing them would still bring down more heat if the bodies were discovered. 

There is a very thin difference between a distraction and the third option where she would take them by subverting their will, essentially enslaving them. For the first, she’d insert some kind of image into their heads, make them think that something was going on that actually wasn’t. The second would be a complex operation… and would carry the implications she should expect from tying the man’s mind to her own.

Best case for the distraction: she convinces them that they’re in the wrong part of town, they go out on a wild-goose chase looking for rebels that are right in front of their faces and give her some breathing room to act. After that is the case where she keeps them busy long enough for support to arrive and take out the collaborators for her. _That_ seems unlikely, unless her buddy from the resistance is packing a radio somewhere on his person. The other scenario leaves unresolved another big issue: transportation. Their wheelman was supposed to provide them a truck. Hell, he may have even had eyes on the very truck sitting outside right now. All she can say is that they’re here, and he isn’t.

In any other situation there might’ve been the option of hoofing it but the army, in it’s infinitely subtle ways, would’ve changed patrol routes. So they are, in a word, fucked. 

Unless she takes the third option.

But wait… idea: what if she combines the three ideas? Undermine the closer man’s focus, draw him inside the door and kill him silently. Lee shakes her head. This is the sort of person she’s become, after “serving” her country for six years. The only attractive part to this idea is that she won’t be enslaving them. Instead, she’ll be manipulating them into doing what she wants. It’s still pretty severe and still ends in a killing… and then there’s also the overwatch. She heaves a sigh and folds her arms.

If they become suspicious at any point, the army will attempt to contact their would-be captors. And even then their superior officer may just decide to radio them for shits and giggles. Meanwhile, for Lee’s group to make it out of the city, their route will cross at least six checkpoints. To make things easy, she needs both of them alive in order to avert prying eyes. 

Another idea: what if—

A knock at the door breaks her concentration, pulling her out of her head quickly enough to induce that blurring effect she hates so much. As every little detail becomes sharper, more vivid, she glances back towards the refugees, picking out each and every head and thinking of each story she glimpsed back when she first met them. It’s now or never, and she doesn’t have a plan besides the third option…

Another knock, more insistent. Lee makes a snap decision. She takes her compassion and her love and buries them deep within her mind, somewhere where she’s certain that they cannot affect or be affected by her. She then takes her anger and locks it up tight. Does the same to all of her other emotions that might be affected by what she’s about to do. Lastly, she takes her empathy, which in her mind has always been an excitable puppy, and brings it close. If it was bristling before, it now begins to squirm, its cries drawing a sympathetic rumbling from around the area where she buried her compassion and love. 

Back in reality, she finds the squirming much more manageable than what the dog and the rabbit were doing earlier. She opens the door before the collaborator can knock again, throwing him off momentarily. The continuing aftershocks from being pulled out of her head cause her to drink in every detail before her. She has some trouble focusing on his mind in the first few seconds of their meeting.

She first finds herself looking into dark, soulful eyes that might’ve belonged to a poet as little as a hundred years ago, back when the revolutionaries of the sixties would’ve been flaring out in their underground communes. The soldier has a chiseled nose and strong jawline that lend her an air of strength. Lee is herself thrown, momentarily, to see the face of a woman in army uniform. A few years in the north and in the army, as it turns out, still aren’t quite enough to smooth over a lifetime of living in the stratified south. 

The woman speaks up. “Staff Sergeant Amanda Keanes. You’re under arrest.” 

Lee responds in kind. “Captain Lee Finch. I think there’s been a mistake.” It is her rank that surprises Sergeant Keanes, but that surprise presents an opening, which Lee takes.

This time, as Lee grasps the sergeant’s mind, she isn’t looking for information. Instead of curling around it to soak up thoughts and images, she pierces it to create an anchor for her own abilities. Lee places her hooks deep, in the sergeant’s motor control and in her sensory centers. She closes her eyes to avoid confusion from the dualistic sensation of looking out of her eyes _and_ Sgt. Keanes’. Her heart begins experiencing palpitations, likely in response to the other woman’s own heart. They _are_ sharing all sensory information now, after all.

A chill sensation descends upon Lee’s torso as she feels Keanes’ body turn over into full flight mode. Before she can take a step, however, Lee pulls on her motor center, paralyzing Amanda’s body from the neck down. The sergeant’s face locks into a rictus of fear as she tumbles forward only to be caught, nose-first, by Lee’s shoulder. 

Lee sets to work, tying their minds closer together and extending her own mental walls to cover everything. The sergeant’s mind wriggles and squirms, trying to figure out how to fight back against an attack on her mind. 

Much as she’d like to think that she is prepared, Lee has never really done anything like this before. The nearest thing was a couple of times where she smother someone else’s mind with her own. Not an action intended for the long term, in other words. 

Setting aside the sheer, horrific villainy of what she’s doing, Lee must also acknowledge that she’s perturbed beyond mere moral qualms. As she works to alter Amanda’s decision making areas, she suddenly realizes that she can feel something pressing against her nose despite having a good three inches of clearance between her face and the wall. Her heart skips a beat as she glances at her right shoulder to see the Sergeant’s nose buried in it. Lee quickly lifts Amanda’s head so that her chin rests on Lee’s shoulder instead. The sympathetic responses in Lee’s own scalp and chin add to her growing horror. Lee’s mind briefly flits to the long drive they originally had planned and groans internally. She has yet to finish what she’s doing, but for a moment she wonders if she’ll make it.

That moment of doubt introduces a bit of slack into her control structures. Sergeant Keanes reveals herself to be a quick study by launching every ounce of weight she can muster against Lee’s mind. Unfortunately she chooses poorly and attempts to push against Lee rather than pull away. Being the one who has made extensive modifications to her own mind, Lee fails to budge an inch and gains an even tighter hold on Amanda’s mind for all of the sergeant’s trouble. The place in her mind, where she buried the dog and rabbit, rumbles. Are its occupants trying to get out? Lee doesn’t know but she accelerates all the same, deftly tying the last few knots into her work and releasing motor control back to her mark.

A prick at the back of her head reminds her that she’s being watched from all sides. Thinking quickly, she begins covering up her activities.

“Are you well, Sergeant?” Lee asks. Amanda beats against her control, the suddenness of the gesture a complete surprise to Lee. She curses Lee in her own mind, but her protests go unheard by anyone else. The cherry to top it all off is that Lee feels… empty? No, she is sympathetic to Amanda’s situation, which only inflames her sense of horror, of _what have I done?_ by ever-increasing degrees. That horror takes whatever satisfaction she might have felt back in Alaska and smothers it. The cherry she was thinking about is that Lee doesn’t know whether to feel pleased that the satisfaction is gone from the act.

And she wouldn’t get time to sort out the question either. Just then, as Amanda’s body rose to its feet, the driver side door of the truck opened and shut, depositing the other individual onto the street. As they begin walking, Lee turns Amanda to face the street.

The first thing she focuses on is his helmet, peeking over the hood. Fear strains against its cage, pulling Lee’s seals taut as she sees the black helmet ringed by a white stripe. She wrestles it back into submission as she makes eye-contact with another army cop. And of all the things he can do in return, he chooses to put on a smile. One of those shark smiles, the kind normally seen on the used car salesmen she remembers from when she was a little girl. The kind that makes the recipient feel like their very visage lights up the smiler’s day.

He greets her. “Evening, uh…” he trails off, making a show of looking at her rank insignia, “Captain, is it?” Lee nods. “Well, Captain, it’s a fine evening tonight.” She starts scanning his mind, digging for information. She also recalls the deficiencies in her partner’s disguise, and begins clouding the cop’s mind to hide them.

He looks up at the sky, trying to be disarming. It isn’t very effective. “We got a nice, full moon and the streets are quiet.” A gunshot sounds in the distance, followed by another, and another. Somebody’s holding an execution, sounds like. The cop drops the smile and looks her in the eye, his posture confrontational. “Makes me wonder why anybody from SpecCom is wandering about this close to base.” 

Lee makes a snap decision. “I’m not wandering, officer.” she states. Special Command has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the Military Police and her intention is to invoke one of SpecCom’s standing privileges. It probably won’t go over well with the cop, but there won’t be a lot that he could do. Being an army enforcer does have its perks.

Lee elaborates on her statement. “I’ve elected to quarter myself here for the night.” The cop raises a brow.

His tone is accusatory. “And your _friends_?” he asks. Lee shrugs.

“Exactly that.” She grabs the shoulder of her partner and shoves him into view. His alias has the name _Smith_ on it. “Schmitty here heard that I was going to be in town and grabbed a bunch of his friends for a surprise visit.” She glares at “Smith”, hoping he’ll play along.

He picks up the conversation without missing a beat. “What?” he asks. He throws his hands into the air. “Can’t a guy have a beer with friends?” He could hardly have given her a more perfect prompt.

“Not if some of those friends are going to leave the rest stranded after curfew,” she retorts.

Smith shrugs in turn. “Alright, so maybe the whole designated driver thing _didn’t_ work out. It’s no big deal.” No big deal? If that ever actually happened, it would be a pretty big deal.

Lee’s ideal lies generally contain three parts truth to them. Like the way her eyes bug out in response. That’s pretty real. So is the way her nag finger twitches, or the way she takes in a breath while she prepares a righteous response. She doesn’t get anywhere, though, because the cop chooses that moment to intervene.

“Hey, cool it, you two!” Once he’s certain that he has control of the situation, the cop pops his next question. “Cap, can you explain to me why a little birdie told us that you were involved in some _un-American_ activities?”

Fuck. Well, that answers that question. For all that she can get done, Lee doesn’t go near prisoners. It was one of the things that she originally brought up to the humanitarians: she’d be too obvious if she ever tried to bust somebody out. She files that… _conclusion_ away and responds.

“Depends. Can you tell me why the spooks were prepared to believe h— it?” She stops herself from saying _him_ just in time. For added insurance, she places a block between the cop’s short term and intermediate term memory areas. He’ll forget all about any slip before the conversation finished, when his short term memory wiped itself clean.

The cop begins responding, but trails off quickly. “Well… I…” In his mind, Lee can feel the memory slipping away as his brain continues to gather new memories. The silence between them stretches out for a few more seconds before he completely forgets that he even asked the question.

Then, Lee breaks it. “Is everything alright, officer?” He starts then looks around before focusing on her.

The handcuffs come out as he responds. “You’re under arrest.”

Lee snorts. “And I bet you’re pleased as pie to arrest me. Will you even tell me the charges? Or will I have to wait for the Brigadier?” She can sense, more than see, the way he stumbles over that, but the cop is otherwise uninterrupted as he walks over to her.

“Conspiring with enemy combatants to undermine the authority of the US Government.” He is, in essence, accusing her of treason. Lee snorts again, the sound a little strained. Thankfully he doesn’t hear it.

“On what evidence?” says Lee.

“Says who?” asks Smith. They both speak simultaneously, each obscuring the other. Lee’s heart flutters as she wonders whether Smith just tipped their hand.

The cop scowls and hunches his shoulders. “We… we caught a rebel—” Smith bursts out laughing. Some windows light up, their occupants’ rest disturbed.

“And our spooks just believed ‘em?” Smith asks.

Lee herself begins to convulse in laughter. “Goddamn, they’re grasping at _straws_ now.” She idly notices that Amanda has taken position at the cop’s side. She doesn’t remember giving an order. Equally concerning is how little she remembers of Amanda’s mental activity over the course of her conversation with the cop. Fear begins straining hard to break the locks she placed on it, adding more urgency to an already high-stakes situation. 

The cop points a finger at her. “ _You_ still haven’t explained how you match their description exactly!”

Lee shakes her head and points to her battle dress uniform. A fair eye could quickly distinguish it from the normal officer’s equivalent. “So what? All he had to do was look for the gal with the fanciest uniform on.” Aside from that, her uniform includes the proper rank insignia for a Captain of the army. And if all that isn’t enough, Smith’s MP uniform lends its credibility to her story. “I mean, how many members of SpecCom are running around Toronto?” The question is rhetorical, Lee knows that the cop wouldn’t have access to anything from her unit. She crosses her arms, satisfied that her point has been made. A half-baked whim urges her to raise her chin in challenge. She bats it away, decides that it's unwise to piss off the cop.

Amanda shifts, the movement comprised simultaneously of tension and satisfaction. At least, her emotional state has strains of both those things. From just to the side of Lee’s direct line of sight, she saw Keanes’ shoulders broaden. Lee has an idea of where the satisfaction might be coming from, a wild imagining born of wilder tales and late college nights. But that will have to wait. For now, she has an idea. It’ll draw plenty more heat her way, but she’s already as good as made, now that the cop is here. 

The cop huffs. “Fine. But this incident is going in my report.”

Lee chuckles. “Please do add it. I’d love to see the reaction it’d cause.” Nothing good for her, of course, but she has no intention of actually letting it get that far. Speaking of plans, Lee decides to lay in one important piece ahead of time. She gives an order to Amanda: _Ensure you are the one driving the truck when we leave_.

The cop turns to leave. Lee holds up a hand. “One more thing, officer.” she says. “I think it’d be in your best interests to take care of these people.”

The cop’s jaw clenches. A little red flag goes up in Lee’s mind, warning her about how she proceeds. “And why’s that?” he asks.

“Because if I were you, I wouldn’t want to be waking the fire brigade up at—” she pauses, makes a show of looking at her watch, then faces him, “— _two a.m._ to tell them why you let seventeen bodies be squished like sardines into a space not meant to hold ‘em.”

Another whim begins taking shape in her mind. It has all the firmness of an idea and all the robustness of a potential plan. The cop works his jaw, muscles in his neck flexing as he tamped down one rage-fueled frustration after another. 

The forming plan declares its intention: more mind shit must be had. It’s the only way to keep the civilians safe. If she were alone, Lee would be shaking her head violently. She’s already taken one thrall and _that_ is far too much. But that’s exactly what the plan wants: to make _both_ cops into her thralls and use them to get her group to safety.

“So, what’s it gonna be?” Lee asks. The second plan declares its own intention: wait on the mind-fuckery, do it later. It’s not really different from the first plan. Hell, if she were more herself she’d have no problem with either plan. But taking away someone else’s ability to say no doesn’t sit right with her. It’s even worse this time, because she’s gone so far as to take a fucking _slave_.

And fuck her in the ass if putting a name on it, on what she just did, doesn’t actually send her spiralling towards one of the many hellholes cooked up by her mind. She doesn’t want to use her abilities any more. Not tonight. Tonight she just wants to get out of here and take the refugees somewhere safe. Then she wants to crawl home and curl up around a bowl of spaghetti. Maybe try one of those shitty soap operas she’s heard so much bitching about. Fuck.

Lee recognizes the signs of stress pulling all her seals taut. She grabs hold of that stress and heaves it over to a bucket where she bottles up all her darker things. Checking over all her emotions, she finds the seals were close to breaking. And in the end, that’s what makes the decision for her.

She takes a couple steps forward. The resistance man follows her and shuts the door behind him. An odd decision to make, but at least he made it without her coercion. Lee then reaches for her abilities, wraps her mind around the cop’s and locks him down. From here, maintaining control is not too different from keeping one hand on him at all times. She turns to her partner and repeats the action. With all three of them under her control, she sets to work.

Events have taken them into the span of an entire two minutes, which is well beyond the capacity of the average human’s short term memory. She finds nothing and rigs it to suppress itself according to a control node. She leaves the particular trigger for later.

Moving to her partner’s intermediate term memory, she immediately finds Amanda’s incident from a mere sixteen seconds ago. From there, she places a Lee-shaped block between long-term memory and intermediate. She sets it to intercept any thoughts involving her and her mind-abilities. Once that’s done, she opens up the intermediate memory section of his brain for rewriting, and removes the block on his short term memory.

She’d changed her mind at the last second. There’s no benefit to keeping him from making new memories, and the drawback is that the block would create a hole. Before she moves on, she finds one more, very important piece of information: Mr. Smith has already given the trouble signal. This is why she never leaves holes in people’s memories: so that they don’t report back to their superiors and ask what they were doing to begin with.

Removing herself from his mind, she sees that he is in a trancelike state. Good. She’ll just do the same thing to the cop and be on her way.

Maybe.

After the cop, she repeats the process one more time on Amanda. All three individuals are now highly suggestible. This isn’t as bad as some of her other tricks. While she can dictate what they will and won’t remember, she can’t make them do things any more than if she had hypnotised them.

She turns to face her partner. “Alright. So, nothing happened with her.” She points to Amanda. “She was just feeling a little woozy. Good thing, too, because it gave us such a break. Don’t you think so?” Smith nods, his mind setting to work trying to consolidate various ideas into a false memory. “Good. For all you know, I’m a real slick talker.” He nods one more time. Lee then closes his memory area, trusting his brain to do what she wants it to. She senses little wisps of awe and fear coalescing in him. It strikes her deeply, hitting her very core with the reminder that she’s not a human.

Stress, that amorphous blob, starts reaching out of the bucket, trying to grab her as her seals are strained once more. She needs to work fast.

Lee turns to the cop. His name is Arthur. “You. I was never here. There was never a group of individuals trying to evade capture by the army. You received the order to come out here, only to find absolutely nothing. The man you caught in the motor pool was nothing more than a goddamn thief. And a hell of a liar to boot. Amanda will deliver us to the drop-off point, and you will forget that I or my partner ever existed.” Alarm tugs at the leg of her pants. She ignores it, believing that her _orders_ covered all the bases.

At last, she comes to Amanda. “Like your partner, you received the order to come here in order to arrest us. You found absolutely nothing. You never experienced being locked inside of your own body, nor did you struggle to take control back. After all, if you were never locked in, why struggle? You did not make threats to me. You did not make promises to me. You will drive us to the drop-off point, and when you return to the motor pool, you will forget absolutely everything that happened here except for the new memories you are currently forming to replace the old ones.” Lee pauses for a second, thinking about what else she needs Amanda to forget. “Your new memories will account for anything abnormal you might have found on examining them.”

There.

It’s done.

* * *

Lee leans back, her back making contact with the wall of the truck. The attack started just as she took her seat. She’d held it back as long as she could, as evidenced by the wisps of yellow, green, and blue tinting the edges of her eyes, but now is a great time to let loose her emotions and try to process some of her shit. She leans forward, catching her head with her hands as she begins releasing her emotions from their cages.

Her breath hitches, a not-quite sob ripping its way out of her chest. She pokes around in her monster bucket, and examines the first thing she pulls.

Amanda Keanes, her new… soon to be ex-thrall. Lee is still working on that one. 

Fuck.

Lee’s never taken a slave before.

Fuck.

She feels… _overwhelmed_. Overwhelmed, disgusted, loopy, and slightly nauseated. Among a multitude of other things. 

Fuck.

One more expletive, and her heart unclenches itself. 

The biggest thing on Lee’s mind right now is a question. She can’t quite put her finger on what that question is, but it’s being shoved into her lap by no less than the likes of curiosity, so it’s got to be a question.

Her world stabilizes, but her mind continues racing at a rocket’s pace.

Lee pulls the next thought related to Ms. Keanes. It’s heavier than sin and has a firmness to match. These two things make it more than just a plan or a course of action. It’s one of those things she has to do. Not for absolution or even forgiveness, because those things shouldn’t belong to a slaver.

Her stomach lurches, threatens to send her tumbling head over heels onto the moving floor. Nothing comes up, though.

If there would be any ounce of wisdom that Lee could leave to the world, it’d be this: it is damn hard to find someone that a body could hate more than themself.

Slaver. That word keeps repeating itself, over and over in her head. A condemnation. No, a damnation. 

A thought inserts itself into her train, disrupting its current progression. It insists that she will never be whole again. Lee can’t decide if she wants to call bullshit, laugh, or just ignore it. The best part? The thought assumed that she was whole to begin with.

She lets loose another expletive, and with it, the worst of her latest lot of shit. She is tired now, wants to nap for the remainder of the journey. Hell, for the remainder of the night if possible. But she can’t leave Amanda enthralled to her service. So Lee decouples the structures she built, using care so as not to do lasting harm, and rips the rest out.

The truck swerves hard to its left. Only now does Lee think that perhaps her timing might have been off. But as the ser— _Amanda_ , Lee forces herself to say the woman’s name, regains control, she relaxes.

“Okay. Okay.” she whispers. Crisis resolved.

For now.


End file.
